1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for content search. Particularly, the present teaching is directed to methods, systems, and programming for content search on a user device.
2. Discussion of Technical Background
Online content search is a process of interactively searching for and retrieving requested information via a search application running on a local user device, such as a computer or a mobile device (handheld or portable device), e.g., a smart phone, tablet, music player, handled gaming console, global positioning system (GPS), from online databases. Content search is conducted through search engines, which are programs running at a remote server and searching documents for specified keywords and return a list of the documents where the keywords were found.
FIG. 1 illustrates a prior art standalone search application 102 on a user device 104, e.g., a mobile device, for browsing-based content search. A user 106 in this example interacts with an application 108 running on the user device 104 to complete certain tasks, such as writing and sending an email using an email client application or planning a trip using a travel agent application. The user 106 may from time to time need to search certain content for the ongoing tasks performed by the application 108. On the prior art user device 104, the user 106 has to leave the current running application 108 and visit the standalone search application 102 to perform the content search with a search engine 110. For example, referring now to FIG. 2, a user is editing a new TWITTER entry about Tom Cruise's new movie using a TWITTER client application on his smart phone and wants to refer to Tom Cruise's another movie. The user then needs to switch to a search application to do a search. As most of the known content search applications perform browsing-based search, i.e., each search result is associated with a webpage (e.g., by a hyperlink) such that clicking one search result will further navigate the user to the webpage through the hyperlink, as shown in FIG. 2, the user may go back and forth in order to find the desired result, i.e., the movie name “Eyes wide shut.” The user then needs to manually bring the search results back to the application 108 from the standalone search application 102 in order to complete the tasks. For example, in FIG. 2, the user needs to perform “copy-and-paste” operations between the search application and the TWITTER client application. In other examples, the user 106 may need to memorize multiple search results and input them into the application one by one.
Apparently, the current mobile search experience is disjointed in the prior art as shown in FIGS. 1 and 2. Users suffer from at least three kinds of problems that greatly reduce the efficiency of the search. First, prior to search, on mobile devices, users more frequently want to search as a result of wanting to complete some tasks, which may begin in another application. As a result, the users need to leave the current application at hand in order to visit the search application. The context switch is costly and slow. Second, the search has no assumption/knowledge of what the user was doing prior to the search, and thus, the returned search results are frequently inaccurate or irrelevant. Users are in charge of correcting and disambiguating. This process is time consuming. Third, after search, users have to transport data back from the search application to the application that they started with. If there are multiple search results, this kind of round trip copy-and-paste behavior is costly.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved solution for content search on a user device to solve the above-mentioned problems.